Things I teach at the University of Westminster

AWJ - Session 4

02/17/2012

Perhaps the best way to learn how to live blog (and to learn what you can do and what kinds of things you can write) is to look at some real life examples. A good place to start is the The Guardian's Minute by Minutes page, which showcases all the live blogs they have running at any one time. Have a read of some of their liveblogs and think about the types of post they feature, the different media and news inputs a journalist uses as they live blog and how they can prepare, as writers, for this kind of job.

02/11/2011

When you're live blogging, you have to write quickly and publish as soon as you can. The aim is to work with the immediacy offered by the net, to give people a sense of an event unfolding in real time. So some mistakes are inevitable -typos etc. You can cover yourself with a disclaimer which you can post early, or paste into your updates as a matter of course...

Today we're going to try live blogging for a while in the afternoon. There are various things we could cover - real live news events or past events that have been filmed... We can talk about what you want to do. Here are a few options:

I think the most interesting one to do would be Egypt. In some ways it would be the easiest too, because it is live and because you can use all the stuff going on on Twitter/Facebook/Tumblr etc... But it's up to you.

We're going to try using CoverItLive today. It's a free service - at least to small scale users - and very easy to use. You sign up for an account, create a live event and then you can past the embed code for that event into a blog post.

That creates a little post that you can expand and update in real time. You do this via the event console which you access via your CoverItLive account.

Reza will demo how to set it up - but it's really pretty easy - though there are sometimes glitches when it comes to embedding the events onto a Wordpress blog...

I think the best way to find out what you can do with CoverItLive is to play around with it. It has some good documentation on its site, which you should look at too. For example:

There's quite a lot of information online about how to live blog. Most of it seems to date from a couple of years ago, which is when it really took off as a journalistic form, I think. And a lot of the guides tend to focus most on the kit you need and how to take care of the practical details of the job. They don't talk about the different things journalists can do with the live blogging form... Perhaps that's because people are still experimenting with it.

This week we're going to look at live blogging. We'll look at some examples of the way professional journalists approach this, some of the tools you can use to do it and then get you live blogging something in the afternoon.

Before that, we need to work on sorting out the group sites. So we'll try to set up the groups and give you some time to finalise the ideas.